-
10 votes
-
Dis.cool is creating profiles of Discord users who have never signed up for their service and they are refusing to delete them.
22 votes -
Amazon Ring updates device security and privacy, including adding mandatory two-factor auth—but continues ignoring larger concerns
9 votes -
The Waterfox browser has been acquired by System1, the company that purchased a majority stake of Startpage in September 2019
12 votes -
Security researchers partner with Chrome to take down over 500 browser extensions in a fraud network affecting 1.7 million users
12 votes -
The downside of diagnosis by smartphone
6 votes -
Watching you watch: The tracking system of over-the-top TV streaming devices
10 votes -
An algorithm was taken to court – and it lost (which is great news for the welfare state)
7 votes -
Four Chinese military personnel charged for Equifax hack
10 votes -
California’s new privacy law is off to a rocky start
12 votes -
Add-on support was just merged into Firefox Preview
@aissn: Add-on support was just merged into Firefox Preview. Thanks @gabrielluong https://t.co/cXOCB00tKk
23 votes -
Google sends a unique Chrome browser identifier through Chrome when you visit their websites
14 votes -
How Twitter's default settings enabled a security researcher to discover phone numbers for over seventeen million accounts
10 votes -
Requesting an export of personal data from Amazon shows how extensively they track your reading habits
11 votes -
Surveillance on UK council websites - A study of private companies’ data collection on council websites across the United Kingdom
8 votes -
What to know before you buy or install an Amazon Ring camera
8 votes -
How ads follow you around the internet
8 votes -
Data
12 votes -
Avast announces that they are shutting down Jumpshot, their subsidiary that's been collecting and selling user data to marketing clients
11 votes -
The EARN IT Act: How to ban end-to-end encryption without actually banning it
16 votes -
Facebook’s Clear History tool is now available to everyone
15 votes -
Facebook to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois
9 votes -
Scroll: A subscription service partnered with major websites that removes ads and many trackers, and pays sites based on your usage
24 votes -
Jumpshot, a subsidiary of antivirus company Avast, is selling users' web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies
30 votes -
Where do you draw the line when it comes to what data collection one can do on you?
(Presuming it's done purely for statistical purposes of course.) I, like most of us am personally fine with age, sex, city level location and relationship status. I really dislike using real names...
(Presuming it's done purely for statistical purposes of course.)
I, like most of us am personally fine with age, sex, city level location and relationship status. I really dislike using real names though since I feel like it ties you to who you are in person, which I really dislike and I support people deciding not to fill them in because in some places even what I've outlined can get you in trouble.
10 votes -
I'm planning to enable the "mark new comments" feature for everyone - any major concerns?
Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which...
Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which settings are available, and that's totally fine—they shouldn't need to. The default setup should be as good as possible, with changing settings mostly for specialized cases.
One particular place on Tildes where this isn't currently being done well is for the "mark new comments" feature, which has always been disabled by default. I think it's one of the best features on the site and makes it much easier to follow ongoing discussions here than on other sites with similar comment systems, but overall, not many users have enabled it.
For example, Tildes got some attention on Hacker News again yesterday, and about 80 new users have registered so far from that. Only 9 of them enabled "mark new comments", even though the welcome message strongly encourages it. Looking at longer periods of time, this seems typical: only about 10% of users ever enable it.
As it says on the settings page for the feature, my reason for disabling it by default was out of privacy concerns. However, I've been doing some review of the data that Tildes stores lately and realized that this was kind of misleading and inaccurate. Because I have HTTP request server logs and some other related data (which is all only kept for 30 days), I effectively have topic visit records from the last 30 days for all users anyway, whether they have the feature enabled or not. The data is more convenient to access for users with the feature enabled, but it's available either way.
Because of that, and because the data will be very useful to combine with some of the upcoming changes I mentioned in the last ~tildes.official post, I'm planning to enable this feature for everyone. Here are the general plans:
- Data about which topics' comments pages a user visits will be stored (for 30 days), along with when and how many comments were there at the time. This enables displaying which topics have new comments since your last visit, and marking those new comments.
- There will no longer be a setting to disable this, but you can still choose whether previously-seen comments are collapsed when you return - the same as the existing checkbox on that page for "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic".
- I will probably implement some sort of "stop informing me of new comments in this topic" feature (separate from the new Ignore one) to stop having the info about new comments in a topic showing up for you.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns about this. If nothing major comes up, I intend to make this change later this week.
82 votes -
Ring's doorbell app for Android sends sensitive user data to multiple analytics and marketing companies
10 votes -
Google researchers find serious privacy risks in Safari’s anti-tracking protections
9 votes -
Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
21 votes -
Can you defeat the privacy chicken?
16 votes -
The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it
23 votes -
MNT Reform open source, modular laptop crowdfunding campaign launches in February
9 votes -
App tracking alert in iOS 13 has dramatically cut location data flow to ad industry
21 votes -
Fifty countries ranked by how they’re collecting biometric data and what they’re doing with it
11 votes -
Billions of medical images available online
10 votes -
Are there any personalized recommendation engines/sites that you trust?
In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me...
In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me some really great personalized suggestions, but that came at the expense of me handing over significant amounts of personal data.
In prioritizing privacy, I feel like I've stepped away from a lot of the big recommendation engines because they're tied to data-hungry companies I am in the process of disengaging with (e.g. Goodreads is owned by Amazon). I can still find stuff I like, but it's often the result of manual searching that turns up popular recommendations that work for me, rather than less well-known or acutely relevant things. last.fm was good at giving me less "obvious" recommendations and would find music I was unlikely to find on my own. I want that, but for all of my media: books, movies, etc.
There's a second concern in that I also feel like I can't trust platforms like Netflix, who seem to prioritize their content over that of other studios. Their recommendations feel weighted in their favor, not mine.
What I want is an impartial recommendation engine that gives me high quality personalized suggestions without a huge privacy cost.1 Is this a pipe dream, or are there examples of this kind of thing out there?
1. I don't mind handing over some of my specific interest data in order to get good recommendations for myself and help a site's algorithms cater to others, as I get that's how these things work. I just don't like the idea of my interests being even more data for a company that already has thousands of intimate data points on me.
18 votes -
The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com
16 votes -
Release of over 100,000 leaked documents from Cambridge Analytica has started, showing the company's work in sixty-eight countries
14 votes -
Promiscuous cookies and their impending death via the SameSite policy
10 votes -
On privacy versus freedom
9 votes -
Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands
35 votes -
How NIST tested facial recognition algorithms for racial bias
5 votes -
Messaging app ToTok has been removed from the Apple and Google app stores following claims the United Arab Emirates government was using it to spy on people
12 votes -
What we know about you when you click on this article—Vox has a pretty typical privacy policy. That doesn’t make it great.
11 votes -
One nation, tracked : An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry
15 votes -
What does your car know about you? We hacked a Chevy and found that automakers collect data through hundreds of sensors and an always-on Internet connection
22 votes -
NIST study evaluates effects of race, age, sex on face recognition software - Findings included that many algorithms had false positive rates 10 to 100 times higher for non-Caucasians
7 votes -
How tracking pixels work
13 votes -
Canadians travelling to or through U.S. should pay close attention to their withering rights: Latest changes to Preclearance Agreement give U.S. officials dangerously extended power on Canadian soil
11 votes -
Ten years ago, DNA tests were the future of medicine. Now they’re a social network — and a data privacy mess
10 votes